We’ve been the best of friends, we’ve been the worst of enemies. We’ve been intimate and we’ve been indifferent. But Stephen Kessler and I have known each other for 35 years and except for the few decades when we didn’t speak, we’ve managed to maintain a robust respect for each other’s shared defiance in the face of mediocrity.
Stephen Kessler has written with a fierce intelligence pretty much every single day of his life. From those early alternative riffs called “Polygraph” that he penned at the dawning of the age of the Santa Cruz weeklies, to his literarily impeccable Redwood Review, to countless gracefully nuanced, and internationally celebrated translations of the A list of Spanish poets, Kessler just doesn’t know how to cease and desist.
And just when we thought we’d already collected enough of his work to savor for years to come, he up and launches not one, but two new works. New prose poems that Proust their jazzy way through some of the key memory spots in his personal biography—Where Was I?—and a brilliantly curated “greatest hits” of memoirs, essays, vision quests, and kvetches titled Need I Say More?
I savored the prose poems, rife with street scenes of LA and Santa Cruz, and picked my way here and there through the essays, delighted to re-meet some California legends like F.A. Nettelbeck and Laurence Ferlinghetti, and stunned by Kessler’s candid eulogies over lost sexual obsessions and the searing cluelessness of youth.
As irritating as it is for me, a fellow writer, to admit, Kessler continues to astonish me, so there’s no way I could make the claim—even for promotional purposes—that these two new pocket-sized books represent the “best of SK.” I’m beginning to suspect that his best is still up the same sleeve that conceals that ace of spades he long ago dealt himself.
All of this is by way of telling you that you’re in for a treat this Wednesday, April 29th when Kessler reads from his new works—and nobody reads Stephen Kessler like the poet/author himself—at Bookshop Santa Cruz. 7:30pm. Get there early or be prepared to listen from the sidewalk.
